“Anarchism, in dealing with this subject, has found it necessary, first of all, to define its terms. Popular conceptions of the terminology of politics are incompatible with the rigorous exactness required in scientific investigation.”

— Benjamin Ricketson Tucker

The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)
Context: Anarchism, in dealing with this subject, has found it necessary, first of all, to define its terms. Popular conceptions of the terminology of politics are incompatible with the rigorous exactness required in scientific investigation. To be sure, a departure from the popular use of language is accompanied by the risk of misconception by the multitude, who persistently ignore the new definitions; but, on the other hand, conformity thereto is attended by the still more deplorable alternative of confusion in the eyes of the competent, who would be justified in attributing inexactness of thought where there is inexactness of expression. Take the term "State," for instance, with which we are especially concerned today. It is a word that is on every lip. But how many of those who use it have any idea of what they mean by it? And, of the few who have, how various are their conceptions! We designate by the term "State" institutions that embody absolutism in its extreme form and institutions that temper it with more or less liberality. We apply the word alike to institutions that do nothing but aggress and to institutions that, besides aggressing, to some extent protect and defend. But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care. Some champions of the State evidently consider aggression its principle, although they disguise it alike from themselves and from the people under the term "administration," which they wish to extend in every possible direction. Others, on the contrary, consider defence its principle, and wish to limit it accordingly to the performance of police duties. Still others seem to think that it exists for both aggression and defence, combined in varying proportions according to the momentary interests, or maybe only whims, of those happening to control it.

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Benjamin Ricketson Tucker 50

American journalist and anarchist 1854–1939

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 7-8 as cited in: Erich Reck (2011) " Carnapian Explication: A Case Study and Critique http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~reck/Reck-C'ian%20Explic.%20(3rd.%20rev.).pdf"

“A totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Gulf

Gulf (p. 545)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

“The term ‘informatics’ was first advanced formally by the Director of VINITI, A. I. Mikhailov, and his colleagues A. I. Chernyi and R. S. Gilyarevskii, in their paper Informatics—new name for the theory of Scientific Information published at the end of 1966. An English translation was circularized in the beginning of 1967. As the authors state in this paper, they are not the first to use this term, and they quote a review by Professor J. G. Dorfmann of their own book Fundamentals of Scientific Information in which Dorfmann criticizes the use of other terminology, such as ‘documentation’, ‘documentalistics’, ‘information science’, and so on. Although the authors do not object to the use of the word ‘Documentation’ in the name of the International Federation for Documentation, nevertheless they claim that this term has not found application in the USSR and indeed they apologize for spending some time in discussing its suitability as a name for ‘the new scientific discipline which studies the structure and properties of scientific information as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methods, and organization’.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Foskett (1970) "‘Informatics’", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 26 Iss: 4, p. 340

“The investigation of the possibility that animals might think in terms of concepts and even categories of important objects has been seriously impeded because comparative psychologists have seemed to be almost petrified by the notion of animal consciousness. Historically, the science of psychology has been reacting for fifty years or more against earlier attempts to learn how we think by thinking about our thoughts. …In other realms of scientific endeavor we have to accept proof that is less than a hundred percent rigorous… think of cosmology, think of geology. And Darwin couldn't prove the fact of biological evolution in a rigorous way.”

Donald Griffin (1915–2003) American zoologist

Animal Minds (1994)

“The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

"Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature" (1863) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/Phen.html
1860s

“A comparative social science requires a generalized system of concepts which will enable the scientific observer to compare and contrast large bodies of concretely different social phenomena in consistent terms.”

David Aberle (1918–2004) anthropologist

David Aberle, Albert K. Cohen, A. K. Davis, Marion J. Levy Jr. and Francis X. Sutton, (1950). T"he functional prerequisites of a society." Ethics, 60(2), p. 100; cited in: Neil J. Smelser (2013), Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences. p. 189

Albert K. Cohen (1918–2014) American criminologist

Marion J. Levy Jr. (1918–2002) American sociologist

“The present article is almost wholly devoted to a single problem—the definition of truth. Its task is to construct—with reference to a given language—a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term 'true sentence. This problem, which belongs to the classical problems of philosophy, raises considerable difficulties. For although the meaning of the term 'true sentence' in colloquial language seems to be quite clear and intelligible, all attempts to define this meaning more precisely have hitherto been fruitless, and many investigations in which this term has been used and which started with apparently evident premisses have often led to paradoxes and antinomies (for which, however, a more or less satisfactory solution has been found). The concept of truth shares in this respect the fate of other analogous concepts in the domain of the semantics of language.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

"The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages" (1931) in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938 (1956) Tr. J. H. Woodger.

“Anthropologists are interested in reconstructing the kinship system as it might have existed at the time of a proto-language. A kinship system can be regarded as composed of two correlated systems: a system of kinship terminology and a set of behaviors that are patterned in relation to the terminological system. We know of no way in which we can rigorously infer the kinds of behavior directly, but it is generally regarded as possible to reconstruct the terminology at least in part. If rigor can be introduced in the procedure of reconstructing kinship terminology, then a generalization of that rigorous procedure is lexical reconstruction.”

David Aberle (1918–2004) anthropologist

Isidore Dyen, ‎David F. Aberle (1974), Lexical Reconstruction: The Case of the Proto-Athapaskan Kinship System. p. 7

“Anarchism, in dealing with this subject, has found it necessary, first of all, to define its terms. Popular conceptions of the terminology of politics are incompatible with the rigorous exactness required in scientific investigation.”

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Benjamin Ricketson Tucker 50

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